Russia says the US has bioweapon research labs in Ukraine, an outrageous claim that was instantly fact-checked to oblivion until Senator Marco Rubio stopped the show by asking a US official under oath: Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?
Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State, could have said “No” but instead she said:
Ukraine has Biological research facilities… which in fact we are quite concerned about — that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into Russian hands should they approach…
So not only is there some kind of research going on, but it’s so safe and fine that the US is worried the Russians might get it. And despite the Russians queuing for days in tanks at the border, no one thought to secure or destroy it?
Then the US official who hid secret labs and worries about what the Russians will do tells everyone that
“It’s classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves…”
I’m not sure whether to hope the US secures the bio-research.
The World Economic Forum, was founded in 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab where he hit upon the winning idea of organizing a ski holiday for the worlds richest people, described as a management training session or something tax deductible. Like most of these conferences, once the richest of the rich were there, everyone else had to be as long as the riff-raff were kept out. The importance of it was almost certainly not the official speeches but the deals done over drinks-with-new-friends at the bar, or on the piste. It was a chance to meet with Moguls on the moguls.
The foundation is mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies, possibly in lieu of the taxes they don’t pay to their home countries. The 1,000 corporate members are all theoretically “$5 billion dollar entities”, except the ones that are $5 Trillion dollar entities, so they are kind of like the UN of the corporate world, with five times as many members and without the hanger-on-erers. (Fifty of the UN’s members would be too small to qualify). At best, the WEF is the ultimate corporate conference club, and at worst, a kind of quasi corporate world government. The truth is somewhere in between, but where?
The WEF elites fly in to Davos in late January every year in private jets while they figure out how to save the world from fossil fuels. In their spare time they probably swap names of pliable politicians, or even meet them. They can also find out the names of great accountants, and swap ideas on how to deal with unacceptable citizens.
I wonder if Klaus hired Professor Yuval Noah Harari to speak at Davos 2020, so everyone that quoted him could be called a conspiracy theorist nutcase? It could work.
It’s hard to say these lines without sounding like a Technocratic-psycho:
“This whole idea of humans have this soul or spirit and nobody knows what’s happening inside them, and they have free will, that’s over.”
Data might allow human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships, by hacking organisms elites may gain the power to reengineer the future of life itself.
People could look back in a hundred years and identify the coronavirus epidemic as the moment when a new regime of surveillance took over…
If we succeed in hacking life, this will be the greatest revolution in biology, since the very beginning of life.
Soon, at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people.“My brain, my body, my life, does it belong to me or to some corporation or to the government….
This is the intelligent design of the IBM Cloud the Microsoft cloud.
— Professor Yuval Noah Harari
He’s like the decoy Fake Time Magazine cover used to hide the real Time Magazine cover.
The gloss is coming off
The WEF is tax-exempt, which is a pretty rich wicket, and the Swiss government taxpayers pay for security at Davos, which is worth about 32 million Swiss francs a year. On top of that the taxpayers pay another few million for “extra security”. But the free run is feeling some friction. Last year a few Swiss politicians and civil society groups criticized the security bill, and the Swiss government announced they’d cut it back by a million or so each year. Go, democracy, Go.
It’s a sign that the people are starting to notice the WEF and there may come a day when politicians don’t want to mention their WEF membership. Who wants to look like a patsy?
My favourite description of the WEF is that they are globalization’s “Mafiocracy” of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats and politicians.
“They promote common ideas, and serve common interests: their own.”
It would be very useful in comments if commenters can talk about what the limits are. When do the WEF get thwarted? The WEF is obviously a hot and influential club, like a radioactive octopus, but Klaus Schwab presumably brags like any shameless compulsive promoter would. So some of the politicians in his fold may be in a cult, but others just spent a weekend skiiing.
__________
*There’s something good about seeing little corporates fight back against the biggest of the big ones.
h/t David E, Mark, Scott of the Pacific, Bill in AZ, Old Ozzie, Jill J, OriginalSteve, Brenda, Mantaray, Vlad the Impaler, Bob Dinn, Konrad, David Maddison, Marksman, Truthseeker, another Ian, Klem, Jelly34, Alistair Crooks, Len, Beth the Serf, John Connor II, Tides of Mudgee, Neville, Beowulf, Rod Stuart and Chris D
Warwick McKibbin reckons Vladimir Putin might be the best thing that’s ever happened to the energy transition.
Speaking at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday, the economist, academic and former Reserve Bank board member argued that surging commodity prices caused by the war in Ukraine could force the urgent shift to clean energy to accelerate.
Really?
In the parallel universe Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
He notes that the EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal.
This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.
While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear power as well.
Europe gets 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of all its oil and gas from Russia. For Germany, the shares are 35 percent and 70 percent, as well as 50 percent of its coal needs.
The pivot from Russia will be painful and retrieving the situation will take a long time – it is like turning around the Titanic.
Read the whole story, it is very important and it is too densely packed to summarize.
STOP PRESS. Hungary bans grain exports, the first sign of an impending global food crisis.
You can take the conspiracy theory out of the story and it is still terrifying.
AND A BIT MORE TO GO ON WITH, A REMINDER ABOUT THE SITUATION CAUSED BY OUR ENERGY POLICY
South Australia is leading the way in the green transition and whenever the wind is low overnight SA depends on local gas plus imported coal power from Victoria.
ANCHORAGE, AK—The deliberate and premeditated invasion of Ukraine by brutal dictator Vladimir Putin has forced the US to reassess the importance of energy independence. With this new resolve, the Biden Administration has taken its first step toward increasing oil production for Americans by selling Alaska back to Russia so we can start drilling for oil there again.
Jen Psaki praised Biden’s brilliance in finding a solution that would prevent an energy crisis while also preventing new drilling on American land. She pointed out succinctly to journalists, “You see, it’s not American land anymore; it’s Russian land.”
The truth
Joe Biden needs to stop buying oil and gas from the Russian dictator, but rather than getting it from the US or Canada he’s talking to a dictator in Venezuela.
President Biden is scrambling to contain soaring oil prices, which closed at more than $123 a barrel on Monday. It speaks volumes about this Administration that it’s seeking help from Vladimir Putin’s client in Venezuela and our estranged Saudi allies rather than U.S. shale producers or our Canadian friends.
The Saudis and UAE are the only OPEC members that appear to have spare capacity, but they’ve rebuffed Mr. Biden’s pleas to increase supply. One reason is they don’t want to alienate Mr. Putin, who has become a power broker in the Middle East. Mr. Biden should never have alienated the Saudis, but we’d be much better off if he simply encouraged U.S. energy production.
The problem isn’t that “Big Oil” wants to keep production low. It’s that Joe Biden, Hassan, and the rest of Senate Democrats have made it clear for years that they want to force “Big Oil” out of business entirely. They’d rather put money in the hands of Iranian terrorists and Putin’s imperial army than put it on the household tables of American oil workers. Even the sight of Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine hasn’t changed their calculus on their opposition to American production of fossil fuels as a necessity for strategic leverage in a very dangerous world.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board slams Biden and Democrats for seeking oil from malevolent dictators in Tehran and Caracas rather than in the good ol’ USA. It makes no sense from a security perspective, nor from an economic perspective:
Easing Venezuelan sanctions would be a strategic blunder that provides a financial lifeline to Mr. Maduro while doing little to ease the oil price spike. Venezuelan oil companies say they can increase production by several hundred thousand barrels a day in eight months. The war in Ukraine may be over by then. …
Shale producers can increase production twice as fast as Venezuelan oil companies, and the profits would go to U.S. workers and shareholders rather than another dictatorship.
The anti gas and oil thing was never about the weather, and not about CO2 either. It’s not about the workers, the voters, or the environment either. Just power and money.
There is pandemonium on the markets and suddenly many nations want to be energy sufficient. It’s perhaps not The Great Reset than the collective-types were expecting?
The gas flows from Russia to the EU are sporadically tightening, and the Yamal-Europe line has been cut off. Gas in Europe is now trading at €340/MWh which is fully 22 times the long term average. Newcastle coal normally trades around $60 per ton, but now is over $400 USD.
A few days ago the former head of MI6 in the UK called for an immediate lifting of the frakking ban which was set to see concrete poured down the only two shale gas wells in England by March 15th. Thirty-five Tory MPs and four peers sent a letter to Boris demanding the same thing. Now even Boris Johnson is suggesting the Green targets could be relaxed, not just for Britain, but for all the West. He went so far as to suggest The West could give itself a “climate change pass” while we figure out how to get energy that isn’t Russian gas.
Major swings in everything. From top left: Dutch Gas, TTP, European Gas storage, Gas flows from Russia, Carbon credits, and Coal forward contracts. | Twitter. Click to Enlarge.
Brilliant: A referendum on Net Zero
Nigel Farage launched a campaign Britain Means Business seeking to force a referendum on the Government’s plan to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions in the UK by the middle of the century.
Who could argue with that, apart from all the people that know the voters don’t want Net Zero if they have to pay for it.
Green Blob has it’s own crisis — how to stay relevant
Imagine an army of community groups suddenly roaming the countryside to save Britain from Vladimir by explaining heat-pump grants and waving infra red detectors at their drafty doors?
It all seems a tad artificial. If the planet was at stake they could have done this all along. Why now?
John Taylor, the energy projects manager at Energy Hub, argues that the UK should be convening local groups that can help give advice on grants for insulation and heat pumps, set up community-owned renewable projects, and help with insulation.
“Volunteers can be provided with thermal imaging cameras to go door to door,” he suggested. They can help “identify cold spots and installing simple measures like draft proofing and radiator panels. They can also help set heating controls and lower boiler flow temperatures.”
He also suggests that community groups can “run a village survey to find out who needs items like DIY loft insulation and draft proofing kits. Then order them wholesale to get bulk discounts and deliver them to a community centre or village hall for people to collect.”
Vladimir Putin might be the best thing that ever happened to Western Energy independence.
UPDATE: Latest news is that Russia says it will end the War on four conditions. Ukraine must stay neutral, recognize Crimea is Russian and that Donestsk and Luhansk are independent. In reply, Zelensky has already done an interview saying “No” but Putin needs to start a dialogue. Zelensky suggests that Putin is in a bubble and may not be getting realistic information.
People were dying, hospitals were overflowing, but even by January 2021 we already knew ivermectin could save three quarters of those who died. Randomized trials of 2,282 people showed that only 2% of people on ivermectin died, compared to nearly 10% of the hapless people who missed out, yet he picked the “missed out” path.
Everything pointed in the right direction. The result of the meta-study was highly significant (p=0.0002!), the risks were almost nothing, the outcome was extraordinary, the effect was dependent on the dose, and the blood markers of inflammation were also reduced, as we’d expect. Yet the conclusion of the same paper was that we needed larger trials before the results could even be reviewed. And this single line that contradicted nearly everything in the paper, was quoted everywhere to say the evidence was “inconclusive”.
This was from the same man who said Ivermectin was “the way forward” and that he would give ivermectin to his own brother. Then suddenly he flipped.
….
A forensic analysis of that strange contradictory paper shows there were two or three other voices who influenced the wording. They were not named. When pressed, Dr Andrew Hill admitted that even The charity Unitaid has a say in the conclusions… This is how the brand name ScienceTM works. It’s not the data that matters.
Watch him squirm, as Dr Tess Lawrie grills him:
Dr Andrew Hill: “I’m not going to let this last for a long time”… (he knows it’s wrong).
He knew 15,000 people were dying every day. “It’s just six weeks” said Hill. That works out to nearly half a million people who could have been saved. And it ended up being a lot longer than six weeks. It was an opportunity missed. The paper was used to sack good doctors, slow research, and feed corporations billions of dollars for treatments that didn’t work.
Follow the documentary maker on Telegram: t.me/OracleFilms
The Abstract:
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug being investigated for repurposing to SARS-CoV-2. In-vitro, ivermectin showed limited antiviral activity and a COVID-19 animal model demonstrated pathological benefits but no effect on viral RNA. This meta-analysis investigated ivermectin in 18 randomized clinical trials (2282 patients) identified through systematic searches of PUBMED, EMBASE, MedRxiv and trial registries. Ivermectin was associated with reduced inflammatory markers (C-Reactive Protein, d-dimer and ferritin) and faster viral clearance by PCR. Viral clearance was treatment dose- and duration-dependent. In six randomized trials of moderate or severe infection, there was a 75% reduction in mortality (Relative Risk=0.25 [95%CI 0.12-0.52]; p=0.0002); 14/650 (2.1%) deaths on ivermectin; 57/597 (9.5%) deaths in controls) with favorable clinical recovery and reduced hospitalization. Many studies included were not peer reviewed and meta-analyses are prone to confounding issues. Ivermectin should be validated in larger, appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities.
Given that an EV is so impractical for long road trips, and is a “second car”, it makes some sense to have effectively a two seater shopping trolley, covered with plastic. At the moment, there is some loophole in the UK where this is allowed on the road, but doesn’t require a drivers license. Bureaucrats are bound to change that any second.
It looks ideally suited to slow London and Paris traffic and tight parking spots. But in higher speed Australian and US cities, I suspect accident stats would look ominous if the 485 kg plastic buggy met a two ton SUV at normal driving speeds. Not that it can do normal driving speeds. At 40km/hr top speed, its probably too slow to be legal on Australian roads, and too fast to be legal on sidewalks.
The sunroof is cute in cold climates, but here in Aus it might cause second degree burns and heat stroke in January. It has a 6kW motor and 5.5kWh battery pack — can it run an airconditioner AND a motor for half an hour?
I would be amazed if this were legal to drive unlicensed (or even licensed) on most Australian roads, but I haven’t asked. It may “take off” in Europe like the Mini did during an oil price crisis. There are no right hand drive options. Here in the vast suburbs, with a top speed of 45km/hr it will be hated by every other driver. Perfect for school zones though.
From Tonyb in comments:
No, don’t laugh, but is this the future of Electric cars, because whether we like it or not, the EV is the way most countries are heading. The Citroen Ami comes to the UK in a few months after taking Europe by storm(ish)
Its a 2 seater that will do 43 miles (60km) on a charge which apparently covers the majority of journeys. I can see it in urban places but not to drive across country, but it wouldn’t be legal anyway on our motorways. Top speed 28mph (40km/h).
The thing is that for an electric car its very cheap at around £6000. Most electric cars over here are around £25/35,000. So it becomes realistic as a second town car and you keep your grown up fossil fuel one. At £30,000 the EV is likely to be your only vehicle and an EV as a first car is unlikely to be a good idea.
So, would it work in Oz’s urban centres?
Unlikely to be available in Australia
There is a webpage with a “.au” domain, and perhaps a theoretical Australian sort of model, with a canvas roof, and a top speed of “45km/hr”. CarPrice suggests it costs $8k in Australia. I doubt it is sold here at all. Wheels Mag had it on their wish list last November.
The Citroen AU page ought to be reported for false advertising, claiming that it works “without emitting CO2”. In Australia that would only apply to homes with solar that only charge at lunchtime, or in SA on a windy day (but not during a storm). Otherwise, it’s 60% fossil fueled.
The eye-opening video about Chinese people in Ukraine, who weren’t evacuated, and who were “permitted” by the CCP to be excited at the arrival of Putin’s tanks, even hanging out Chinese flags to welcome their Russian comrades until suddenly they realized that wasn’t such a good idea. The CCP Flags were hurriedly packed away and some went so far as to pretend to be Japanese… because some of the malevolent intent here is just so toxic and word was spreading.
The commentator here, SerpentZA (Winston Sterzel), did videos of what was happening in China that I also posted on during the earliest days of the Wuflu — literally Feb 2nd, and Feb 8th, 2020.
A South African who lives in China — he has unusual insight.
Strategically, Russia would be crazy if it weren’t funding Green Groups to scare the West out of using its own resources and hobbling its own energy grid.
Russia has the motive, the means and the opportunity. Ask not whether Putin was funding some Greens, but whether Putin would not be.
These dark money trails across international borders are almost impossible to pin down, but there are clues, leaks and links suggesting Russia was sending hundreds of millions of dollars to support anti-fossil-fuel Green environmentalists.
Yesterday Russian troops did a hostile takeover of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. So in that spirit it’s time to ask if Russia was funding Western Greens was it preparing for War or just worried about walruses?
Would Good Global Citizen Russia say No Thanks to a chance to gain dominant control of a key strategic market?
A mere 15 years ago, countries in the EU produced more gas than Russia exported. Yet European production has plunged by more than half during the past decade. Putin has happily filled the supply gap.
In 2020 Russia exported nearly three times more gas than Europe produced. What’s amazing is that Europe increased its reliance on Russian gas even after Gazprom repeatedly suspended pipeline exports to Ukraine.
Europe still had the gas, it just needed to be convinced not to use it:
Europe had an estimated 966 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable wet natural gas resources as of 2013, about enough to supply the EU for 60 years. Much of this is located in eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. But France, Britain, The Netherlands and Germany are also sitting on shale deposits.
In 2014, a NATO bigwig and former Prime Minister of Denmark claimed the Russians were fuelling the opposition to frakking.
Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen blamed Russia for fuelling the fracking opposition. “Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” he noted in 2014.
“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” said Rasmussen…
According to DeSmog (remember them?) this was revealed at a London’s Chatham House event in 2014 and was not supposed to be leaked (or maybe it was?). DeSmog’s entire ammunition against this quote is that Rassmussen later said “it was my interpretation”, which confirms that he said it.
Four years later US congressmen were releasing reports describing potential funding chains from Russia to non-profit environmental groups.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who chairs the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, released a report in March that explores Russia’s motives for disrupting America’s energy sector.
“Russia benefits from stirring up controversy about U.S. energy production,” Smith said in a press release. “U.S. energy exports to European countries are increasing, which means they will have less reason to rely upon Russia for their energy needs. This, in turn, will reduce Russia’s influence on Europe to Russia’s detriment and Europe’s benefit. That’s why Russian agents attempted to manipulate Americans’ opinions about pipelines, fossil fuels, fracking and climate change. The American people deserve to know if what they see on social media is the creation of a foreign power seeking to undermine our domestic energy policy.”
Smith’s report describes the Russian scheme to use nonprofit entities to influence and sway U.S. public policy and public opinion against fracking. The evidence in the report shows that Russia has been using U.S. environmental groups to spread what Smith aptly describes as “propaganda” to undermine America’s natural gas revolution.
Росгвардия
The SeaChange Foundation, in San Francisco has apparently given out “about $400 million” between 2007 and 2015 to “environmental groups that have worked to block fracking and pipeline construction that make natural gas development and distribution possible.” Downstream recipients include the Tides Foundation, which received $8 million, and the U.S. Climate Action Network ( $7.3 million). SeaChange also gave $30 million to the Energy Foundation which then funded the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
A 29-year CIA veteran Kenneth L. Stiles analyzed the links, and followed the money, as much as anyone could. The dollars track back from local Virginia green groups right through one or two layers of NGO’s and back to opaque Foundations in Bermuda which were set up by people who also used to work with a Russian Minister and friend of Putin.
Two of these local environmental groups “are, without a doubt, agents of influence to Moscow through [a] networking system of shell companies and foundations,” Stiles said.
The Russians “executed a political agenda with little or no paper trail,” the letter explains, by using a Bermuda-based shell company, Klein Ltd., “to funnel tens of millions of dollars” to a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Sea Change Foundation that focuses on climate change.
The Sea Change Foundation then moves the money in the form of grants to other nonprofit environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund.
Klein Ltd, the shell company that supplies the money operates out of Bermuda and isn’t required to disclose the identity of donors. Klein itself was formed by a law firm in Bermuda called Wakefield Quin. The top administrators of that, in turn, apparently have also held top positions in investment groups owned by a Russian Minister and friend of Putin:
The Russian connection with Klein, and from there to Virginia, comes in the form of Bermuda-based law firm Wakefield Quin, which was instrumental in Klein’s formation in March 2011. The law firm shares the same address with Klein and 20 other companies, congressional investigators determined.
Wakefield Quin’s top lawyers and administrators have held what the lawmakers’ letter to the treasury secretary describes as “directorship positions” with an investment group owned by Leonid Reiman, “a Russian minister of telecommunications and a longtime friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Having friends of Putin helping you save your environment takes on a whole new flavour now.
One day when the ABC finally gets the Internet they’ll be able to find official pages like “Known Floods in the Brisbane and Bremer River Basin“. And one day the half billion dollar BOM agency will be able to update graphs like this within a week of a new flood peak, like bloggers did (above).
Ken Stewart went looking for lost Rain Bombs and found them
As Ken reports the ABC made a fuss over three Queensland sites recording more than 1 metre of rain in just four days. But neither the ABC or the BOM is telling Australians that there have been at least nine similar “Rain Bombs” before and most of them were more than one hundred years ago.
I went looking at Climate Data Online for four day rainfall totals over one metre, to compare with the recent totals above at Mount Glorious, Pomona, and Bracken Ridge. For a start, Pomona’s BOM station has been closed for years, and Bracken Ridge is not listed at all, so those reports are from rain gauges external to the BOM network and can’t be checked. That’s OK. In about half an hour I found the following four day rainfall records.
Crohamhurst
4/2/1893
1963.6mm
Yandina
3/2/1893
1597.8mm
Tully Sugar Mill
13/02/1927
1421.3mm
Palmwoods
4/2/1893
1244.6mm
Buderim
3/2/1893
1150.3mm
Bloomsbury
20/01/1970
1141.8mm
Dalrymple Heights
6/04/1989
1141mm
Innisfail
3/04/1911
1075.8mm
Nambour
11/1/1898
1013mm
1893 was a wet year! Crohamhurst had 2023.8 in five days, and Brisbane had three floods in two weeks in February and another in June.
And there is no such thing as a “rain bomb”, a term invented to make it sound unprecedented. This was an entirely natural and normal rain event. Slow moving tropical lows drift south every few years in the wet season, producing a large proportion of Queensland’s average rainfall.
It’s another Redpill moment. Spread the news. Australians need to know the media and the BOM are not giving them the whole truth. Has anyone in the BOM called up the ABC and corrected their mistake? Isn’t that their job?
At least eight people have died in dreadful flooding in South East Queensland and Brisbane. The slow moving rain system moved south through NSW, inundating towns, and has arrived in Sydney and surrounds, where evacuations have begun.
Despite the pain, some are already exploiting the situation for their climate religion or their retirement plan. What was torrential rain is now a rain-bomb, and to stop floods they yell at us that the Climate Change Emergency must be our priority!
A few days ago the floods in Brisbane peaked at 3.85m. Apparently this was due to a surplus of coal fired power or a lack of wind turbines, or something like that. But this photo below, was taken in Brisbane 129 years ago, when there were almost no coal turbines anywhere in the world, and CO2 levels were ideal, yet floods reached 8.3m.
Not climate change: the flood waters rose to 8.3m.
And in the land of flood, fire and drought, it keeps happening. In 1974, floods in Brisbane reached 5.45m. In 2011 the waters were 4.46m deep. Obviously things have changed a bit: the Wivenhoe dam wasn’t there during the first two floods, and the hydrology of city streets is not like it used to be. Nonetheless the flood of 1893 was shocking.
The 1893 Black February Flood was not just one flood but three floods in a row in one month that caused 35 deaths. Another 190 were hospitalized.
The tide gauge in the city reached 8.35m, which was almost as high as the 8.43m rise recorded in floods in 1841. (Imagine how bad that flood was?)
Both the Victoria bridge and the Indooroopilly Railway bridge collapsed.
Trove. National Library of Australia.
Indigenous people, apparently knew of the risks of flooding and built their camps on higher ground. Probably, flooding has been going on since time began. It is said that they tried to warn the settlers not to build to close to the river but the settlers did it anyway.
.
Shocking footage though a few days ago:
Brisbane.
terrifying moment houseboat smashes into ferry terminal before capsizing forcing man to swim through dangerous waters to safety – as #floods continue to ravage #Queenslandpic.twitter.com/YVSyCHQ2m8
By 2050, the world will be throwing out 2 million tons of wind turbines and 6 million tons of solar panels every year.
One reason the world may be throwing away so much not-so-renewable waste is that recycling it costs ten times as much as what is recovered.
Who would have thought that collecting low density energy in extreme environments would create megatons of tough, non-biodegradable infrastructure, embedded with toxic heavy metals?
Graveyard of the green giants: It’s the hidden cost of our dash for windpower – thousands of decommissioned blades that are so difficult to recycle, they are just dumped as landfill,
writes TOM LEONARD, DailyMail
Scientists at America’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory have warned that in the next few decades, the world faces a ‘tidal wave’ of redundant blades that will number ‘hundreds of thousands, if not more’.
By 2050, it’s predicted that the world will need to dispose of two million tons of wind turbine blade waste every year. In the UK, the volume already exceeds 100,000 tons per year.
The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, up to 78 million tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life and the world will create another six million tons of photovoltaic waste every year. Where to put all of that is potentially an even bigger headache than the turbine blades. It’s very complicated to recover the more valuable materials, such as silver and silicon, used in solar panels.
Research suggests the cost of recovering the materials outweighs the cost of extracting what can be reused by a ratio of ten to one. In other words, if the cost of recycling is $10 you get only $1 back.
And unlike wind turbine blades, solar panels contain toxic materials such as lead that can contaminate the ground as they break down, so dumping them in landfill sites poses serious issues.
And what about the lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars? Here, too, there’s a money issue. Japanese researchers say the value of the materials that can be recycled from them is about a third of the cost of the recycling operation, while it’s five times cheaper to mine new lithium than extract the old lithium from batteries.
Did you know that when you virtuously shelled out £45,000 on a Tesla Model 3?
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ANCHORAGE, AK—The deliberate and premeditated invasion of Ukraine by brutal dictator Vladimir Putin has forced the US to reassess the importance of energy independence. With this new resolve, the Biden Administration has taken its first step toward increasing oil production for Americans by selling Alaska back to Russia so we can start drilling for oil there again.
Strategically, Russia would be crazy if it weren’t funding Green Groups to scare the West out of using its own resources and hobbling its own energy grid.
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